You would think that Perricone’s hubris would be front-of-mind for any prosecutor who might even think about hopping on a computer to get chatty about cases. But you’d be wrong.

Last year – after mayoral candidate Desiree Charbonnet’s campaign accused her opponent City Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell of misusing her city-issued credit card – Christopher Bowman, an assistant district attorney who functioned as the office spokesman, was all over Twitter disparaging Cantrell and mocking her explanations about her use of the card. His tweets coincided with the district attorney’s office announcement that it was referring an anonymous complaint about Cantrell’s credit card use to the Louisiana attorney general’s office.

Unlike Perricone, Bowman didn’t obscure his identity. Which is more honest, I guess, but shockingly reckless. Using @CSBowman, an account that identified him as an assistant district attorney living in New Orleans, Bowman repeatedly and aggressively accused Cantrell of guilt. He tweeted links to stories that local news organizations had published about her credit card use, and he often supplemented those links with his own commentary. In one tweet, he followed a link to a New Orleans Advocate story with the following hashtags: “#RayNagin #PartDeaux #WhatElseDoWeNotKnowAboutThisCandidate #YouWantHerInControlOfYourTaxDollars”

Not only did he compare her to the former New Orleans mayor who’s serving time in prison, but Bowman also brought up Cantrell’s name when he tweeted a story about the mayor of New Roads who resigned and pleaded no contest to the charge that he’d misused a public credit card. In a tweet he addressed to the candidate, he wrote, “@LaToyaforNola some people go to jail for misusing #TaxPayer credit card, but others get control of ½ billion.”

“Hate to say it,” he wrote in one tweet that linked to a Cantrell credit card story, but “#IToldYou #RayNagin #RemindsMeOfRay #WhatElseDoWeNotKnow”

Bowman’s Twitter account is no longer active, and District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro declined Wednesday to make him available for an interview. Cannizzaro took issue with a question comparing Bowman’s online activity to Perricone’s. “The 13-month-old tweets you have referenced were posted by Assistant District Attorney Christopher Bowman on his personal Twitter account, without my knowledge or authorization,” he said in a statement Nov. 28.

“I find any attempt to liken these posts to the public commenting scandal years earlier at the U.S. Attorney’s office to be far-fetched. Mr. Bowman’s posts were not made anonymously. They did not divulge secret grand jury information. And they did not involve a case that was being investigated or managed by this office.”

Some of Perricone’s comments were five years old when they became an issue. So why does Cannizzaro think it matters that it was way last year when Bowman publicly disparaged Cantrell? It’s also unclear why an assistant district attorney openly talking about the subject of an investigation is better than an assistant U.S. attorney using subterfuge.

Bennett Gershman, a Pace Law School professor and the author of two books on prosecutorial and judicial ethics, looked at images of Bowman’s tweets and said, “This, to me, is probably in some ways worse than what Perricone did. Here you are aligning the prosecutor’s office in this kind of vendetta against this candidate,” he said. “I mean with Perricone … maybe you weren’t sure who was doing the public enflaming. But here you know.”

Bruce Green, a Fordham University School of Law professor and the author of two books on attorneys’ professional responsibility, concurred. “While he’s not speaking in his official capacity, he’s identified as a prosecutor,” he said of Bowman, “and he’s making statements which are extrajudicial and that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation against another person. And when people read it … they may perceive that it’s not just some guy speaking, but the state speaking.”

You’ll note that Cannizzaro said his office wasn’t investigating Cantrell; it had passed the matter on.

“So what?” Green said. “His office actually had the case at one time. So that suggests (Bowman) may have access to knowledge that other people don’t have and that he’s not just expressing views based on what he’s reading in the paper.”

R. Michael Cassidy, a Boston College Law School professor and the author of 2005’s “Prosecutorial Ethics,” was the only one of the three law professors who looked at Bowman’s tweets and called the case “tricky.” He thinks Bowman may have violated the same rule the other professors mentioned, which prohibits prosecutors from making certain statements about the accused. But Bowman might be able to argue, he said, that Cantrell hadn’t been accused. “I think she had been accused,” Cassidy said, “because (Cannizzaro) had received an anonymous complaint” against her, but she hadn’t been booked with or charged with a crime.

She never was. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced in mid-October his decision not to charge her with a crime.

Though his initial response suggested Bowman’s tweets were not a big deal, Cannizzaro acknowledged in response to a follow-up question that “I found some of the remarks imprudent for a public representative of this office, and the matter was addressed. I do not comment on internal personnel matters.”

Not only was Bowman public with his tweets attacking Cantrell, but he wrote them in a way intended to make sure that she would see them.

And her campaign did.

“We saw them, and we ignored them,” David Winkler-Schmit, the communications director for Cantrell’s campaign said of Bowman’s tweets. They didn’t complain to Cannizzaro, he said. “We weren’t making complaints. We had an election to win.”

Beau Tidwell, Cantrell’s communications director at City Hall, provided a similar written statement Thursday. “Throughout her campaign, Mayor Cantrell was focused on doing the work and making her case to the people of this City," he said. "She did not allow herself to be distracted by online trolls, and neither did the people of New Orleans.”

Gershman, the law professor, said he finds it hard to believe that another prosecutor in New Orleans would mimic Perricone. “What is he doing?” he said of Bowman. “It’s crazy. You don’t see prosecutors anywhere engaging in public tweeting and stuff like this. It’s just beyond what a normal, reasonable, proper, ethical prosecutor would ever do.”

What might one tweet about Bowman’s recklessness?

#Perricone #PartDeaux #RemindsMeOfSal.

Jarvis DeBerry is a columnist on the Latitude team at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Latitude is a place to share opinions about the challenges facing Louisiana. Follow @LatitudeNOLA on Facebook and Twitter. Write Jarvis at jdeberry@nola.com or @jarvisdeberry.